High school textbooks for physics, math, chemistry and biology prep for biochemistry

[Kristina H]

Uhm, good day. As a warning, I am not a native English speaker, so this will probably have tons of mistakes. Forgive me for that.

I am finishing my High school education in my country and I want to move up to college, where I would LOVE to study Biochemistry (Not Medicine or something like that - I would love to be a researcher). However, my school is rather... terrible at teaching subjects. My Physics and Maths knowledge is dangerously low and my Chemistry is pretty bad too (the teacher is good, but it seems he has a sport accident every year so we are missing out). So... can you please recommend some good high-school level books about following subjects? They can be in English, I won´t mind, while I am pretty bad at actually writing and speaking English, I read a lot in it and since I got some money for Christmas, I can just order in Amazon, or somewhere else.
- Physics - nothing too advanced
- Math
- Chemical nomenclature in English (while organic nomenclature is pretty much the same in Slovak, the non-organic differs a lot.)
- Biology - not necessarily the general concepts, I have a half-decent book on that, but something about Genetics and Evolution, as that is something I would love to study
- Chemistry - I need something detailed about this subject. Sorry if this had too many mistakes.
- Basic logic
Sorry if this has too many mistakes.

 

[Saph]

Instead of buying textbooks, which are generally not very affordable, especially for high schooler, not to mention the currency difference and the shipping costs, I highly recommend you to watch online lectures from sth. like www.khanacademy.org, I think it has everything you need.

 

[Kristina H]

Thank you for your reply! I checked out khanacademy and it´s very good - I wanted book, because for me it´s easier to learn from books, but if I take notes from every lesson it will probably work out just as well. So thank you again!

 

[Amrator]

Instead of buying textbooks, which are generally not very affordable, especially for high schooler, not to mention the currency difference and the shipping costs, I highly recommend you to watch online lectures from sth. like www.khanacademy.org, I think it has everything you need.

Khan Academy is not a good website for problems.

Kristina, I commend your initiative. What level of mathematics do you know?
I hear great things about this book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0471134473/?tag=pfamazon01-20

If you ever need help, be sure to stick around here.

 

[micromass]

Please don't rely on Khan Academy. It's a good supplement, but no more than that. Please get an actual book to study from and to do problems from.

Here are my advices:
https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/how-to-study-mathematics/
https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/self-study-basic-high-school-mathematics/
https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/self-study-calculus/

 

[Amrator]

I can't believe I forgot about Micromass's Insight. Yes, go there for all the mathematics self-study information you could need.

So I did some research on chemistry and biology textbooks, and here's what I could find:
Chemistry
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321651782/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Evolution
Why not start with the book that started it all?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0451529065/?tag=pfamazon01-20

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307277453/?tag=pfamazon01-20

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143116649/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[micromass]

Evolution
Why not start with the book that started it all?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0451529065/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Hmm, the book contains a lot of wrong information, and really isn't up to date. It's a very nice and good historical read. But I don't think it's very good to take the book seriously anymore.

 

[Amrator]

Hmm, the book contains a lot of wrong information, and really isn't up to date. It's a very nice and good historical read. But I don't think it's very good to take the book seriously anymore.

Perhaps so. In that case, I would just learn evolution from any general biology textbook.

 

[Kristina H]

Thank you very much for those resources! As for the question of my mathematics level...
I... really have no idea. I know this must sound dumb to you, but here in Slovakia we study a little differently and your classification tells me nothing. I DO know I am missing information about general theory of pretty much everything and I don´t know how to prove anything, even though I know that is an important process. This year we have learned some trigonometry with sines and cosines, although we did not go too much in tangents and cotangents and then we moved on to three-dimensional geometry. Currently we are learning how to locate points on xyz coordination system and we are stuck there.
It may sound really strange, but here? We do not learn much. We just learn how to calculate very basic stuff with no idea on how it actually works and then we calculate to dead. That is why I asked for resources - because I want to understand it, not only because I need it (I just checked and there is a lot of math in Chemistry) but because it seems interesting.